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Harrison E. Salisbury, 84, Author and Reporter, Dies

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Harrison E. Salisbury, a dashing Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times who roamed some of the world's most inaccessible places and later became a top editor and prolific author, died Monday morning in a car that his wife was driving outside Providence, R.I. He was 84 and lived in Taconic, Conn.

The cause was a sudden heart attack, said his wife, Charlotte Y. Salisbury, who added that her husband had a history of heart problems.

Mr. Salisbury was the author of 29 books, among them the 1969 best seller "The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad." He was also the first editor of the Op-Ed page at The Times.

He won his Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for a series of articles he wrote after five years as The Times's bureau chief in Moscow. Much of his other work, as journalist and author, also dealt with events in the Communist world.

Later, as one of the chief editors of The Times, he worked to maintain and enhance the quality of various aspects of its news report. He took steps, along with other editors, to enrich the coverage of areas like the arts and religion. Nurturing a Novelty In Times Coverage

It was in 1970 that the Op-Ed page was begun, with Mr. Salisbury in charge, and he supervised it until he retired from The Times in 1973. The page appears daily opposite the editorials and has articles by outside contributors, voicing a wide variety of views, in addition to commentary by regular Times columnists. It also pioneered the American use of nonpartisan but political satirical illustration.

At the page's inception, Mr. Salisbury later recalled in a volume of memoirs, he "feared we might run out of materials and piled up an inventory of 150 articles." But he added with characteristic brio: "I was stupid. We got 100 to 200 submissions a week. Everyone in the country wanted to speak out, and we let their voices be heard."

His own voice was heard in his books and thousands of dispatches.

"The 900 Days," about how the Soviet Union's second-largest city endured a protracted Nazi siege, drew enthusiastic praise. "I do not believe that any other Westerner could have written this epic so well," the British man of letters C. P. Snow wrote in The Times Book Review.

As a correspondent and an author, Mr. Salisbury was intrepid, enterprising and indefatigable. His last book, "Heroes of My Time," was published earlier this year, and in a review of it written for next Sunday's issue of The Times Book Review, Michael Janeway, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, offered, quite unaware, a valedictory, calling Mr. Salisbury a "monument to the fine perversity of the reporter in the field who deals in grit, risks life and limb and tilts against orthodoxy." 'Romantic' Reporter Who Could Do It All

Clifton Daniel, a fellow foreign correspondent who went on to be Mr. Salisbury's boss as managing editor of The Times, said yesterday: "He not only was a romantic correspondent, he was also a practical newspaperman who could handle every aspect of his trade. His great journalistic creation was the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. He created a sensation with it."

Some of Mr. Salisbury's fellow journalists whispered that he sometimes exaggerated in his reporting. He had a nearly boundless confidence in his reporting and intuitions, one that would sometimes lead him to conclusions that, given his larger-than-life personality, few editors at the time dared challenge.

Neil Sheehan, an author who spent eight years as a Times reporter, emphasized yesterday what he saw as Mr. Salisbury's contentiousness. "He had physical and moral courage, a wonderfully suspicious mind, a remarkable instinct for detecting falsehood and a delight at exposing lies in print," Mr. Sheehan said.

He added that Mr. Salisbury's "great contribution as a journalist was his capacity for making trouble for the powerful, such as his reporting from Hanoi, in 1966, that the Johnson Administration was killing thousands of civilians while claiming to be conducting a 'surgical bombing campaign' in North Vietnam." Making His Mark In the Soviet Union

Turner Catledge, who was managing editor and then executive editor of The Times from 1951 to 1968, wrote in his memoirs that his predecessor as managing editor, Edwin L. James, said he would hire Mr. Salisbury if Mr. Salisbury could get a visa to enter the Soviet Union. Mr. Salisbury had had a fine career with the United Press, and The Times had an opening in Moscow.

"He returned with the visa in a couple of weeks," Mr. Catledge wrote, "and for the next five years" -- 1949 to 1954 -- "he was our correspondent in Russia, doing an excellent job under the most difficult circumstances."

He subsequently was a wide-ranging reporter and correspondent based in New York before being placed in charge of the paper's national coverage from 1962 to 1964, assistant managing editor from 1964 to 1972 and associate editor from 1972 to 1973.

In later years, he contributed occasional articles and reviews to The Times and continued writing books, including "Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times" (1980).

"He can report, he can write, he can edit, he can see story ideas, he can direct others," Mr. Catledge said. "He can do all these things because, besides having natural talent, he has a passion to excel."

A lanky six-footer, Mr. Salisbury was shrewd, reflective, sometimes aloof and unquenchably enthusiastic about his work. He called himself a "flat-toned Midwesterner," but he had an fine-toned sense of history.

He also had a flair for highlighting those aspects of a situation that he found dramatic -- including, now and then, his own presence on the scene. Recalling a reporting trip to North Vietnam in the winter of 1966-1967, he wrote, "I could have been killed in Hanoi as I crouched in a concrete manhole while the B-52's flew over." A Censor's Hand On Dispatches

During the cold war years that he spent as a Times correspondent in the Soviet Union, his reportage came in for criticism. Gay Talese, a former Times reporter, wrote later in "The Kingdom and the Power," that in those years there were Times readers who considered that Mr. Salisbury's "dispatches reflected excessive sympathy for the Soviet Union."

For his part, Mr. Salisbury emphasized that his reports had been subjected to heavy censorship by the Soviet authorities, and he later criticized Times executives for not labeling them "Passed by Soviet Censor."

Yet censorship was not a problem for him in writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning series of 14 articles: he typed much of it in a room at the Hotel Algonquin after his return from Moscow.

The series included what he later described as "observations of reality as I had seen it in Russia from the Neva to the Amur, from the Lena to the Volga, a detailed reconstruction of Stalin's terror, an overview of Russia's real life -- the drunkenness, the bureaucracy and the famine of goods, services and ideas after nearly 40 years of Bolshevism -- a firsthand glimpse of the new leaders, the new policies, the extent to which they were, and were not, breaking from their Stalinist roots."

Though the articles won widespread praise, it was not unanimous. Robert Manning, a former editor in chief of the Atlantic, wrote later that "critics on the right damned the series for softness toward the Communists." Turning Attention To Issues at Home

Mr. Salisbury's ensuing years as a New York-based reporter were full of variety. He plunged into local reporting with an enthusiasm rare for a returned foreign correspondent, a routine assignment on dirty streets turning into a major series on the city's sanitation system, a visit to Brooklyn juvenile delinquents turning into a book, "The Shook-Up Generation."

He was on temporary duty in the Balkans for part of 1957, and The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its international reporting that year.

In 1960 a wave of sit-in demonstrations by blacks spread across the South, and The Times sent Mr. Salisbury to appraise the racial situation in Southern cities.

He arrived in Birmingham, Ala., where the police commissioner, T. Eugene Connor, known as Bull, had declared to the city's blacks "as long as you live and as along as Connor lives, there will be segregation in Birmingham and in the South."

Mr. Salisbury was soon told that there had already been violence against blacks and Jews there, and he was struck by the degree of anxiety he found in the city. He then wrote a dispatch that The Times published on the front page under the headline "Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham."

In that article, he wrote that in Birmingham "more than a few citizens, both white and Negro, harbor growing fear that the hour will strike when the smoke of civil strife will mingle with" the ordinary fumes from local heavy industry.

He also wrote that "every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus."

His reporting provoked outrage in some quarters. A headline in The Birmingham News read, "N.Y. Times Slanders Our City -- Can This Be Birmingham?"

Before long, Mr. Connor and other city officials filed libel suits variously against Mr. Salisbury and The Times, asking millions of dollars in damages.

Late in 1964, an Alabama court found in favor of Mr. Connor after other suits had been dismissed. He was awarded $40,000.

But when the case moved up to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the judges found that Mr. Connor was not entitled to damages and declared that Mr. Salisbury and The Times had "exhibited a high standard of reporting practices." Quick Reaction To Death in Dallas

After becoming director of The Times's national coverage, Mr. Salisbury was having lunch at a midtown Manhattan club on Nov. 22, 1963, when a fellow club member brought word that President Kennedy had been shot.

Mr. Salisbury wrote later, "I dropped my napkin, leaped down the stairs, ran the two and a half blocks" to the Times building and got "on the telephone to order staff to Dallas -- everyone I could reach who could fly in by nightfall."

The White House correspondent for The Times -- Tom Wicker, later a Times columnist -- was in the Presidential motorcade when the bullets struck Kennedy. He spent the hours that followed gathering facts, quotations and other material for what became The Times's main article about the assassination.

Mr. Salisbury, describing his own work that day, wrote later: "I made one contribution to Tom's beautiful story. At 5 P.M. I ordered him to halt reporting and start writing. Just write every single thing you have seen and heard. Period. He did. Through Tom's eye we lived through each minute of that fatal Friday."

Then Mr. Salisbury remained at his desk in the newsroom, as he put it, "almost continuously for the next several days," overseeing post-assassination coverage. Two Crucial Weeks In North Vietnam

In his years as a Times editor, he continued to do reporting, and he aroused controversy with his dispatches in December 1966 and January 1967 about North Vietnam, where, after long efforts to obtain a visa, he was admitted and spent two weeks while the Vietnam War raged.

After arriving in Hanoi, he reported that American warplanes had been bombing nonmilitary targets in North Vietnamese cities, despite denials from the United States Government.

In his first dispatch from the capital of North Vietnam, he wrote, "Contrary to the impression given by the United States communiques, on-the-spot inspection indicates that American bombing has been inflicting considerable civilian casualties in Hanoi and its environs for some time past."

His reporting about North Vietnam won praise, but it was also challenged and criticized by officials of the Defense and State Departments, some congressmen and others.

In addition, Mr. Catledge wrote in his memoirs that "I'm sorry to say that we in New York compounded an editorial slip that gave Salisbury's critics something to harp on."

"In his first dispatch, Salisbury gave no attribution for figures on the civilian casualties he reported," Mr. Catledge went on. "Quickly, with an air of triumph, U.S. Government officials declared that Salisbury's casualty figures were the same as those put out by the Government of North Vietnam."

Mr. Catledge contended in his memoirs that this criticism was silly and added, "Where else would he get such figures in North Vietnam? He did not claim to have counted the bodies himself."

"I was sorry that we had not anticipated the objection," Mr. Catledge wrote, "but we were so excited by Salisbury's series that we simply didn't think of it." And he observed that "to end the issue we noted in later articles that the figures came from North Vietnamese officials."

"Many people assumed that his feat would win him a second Pulitzer Prize," Mr. Catledge continued. "I was serving on the Pulitzer advisory board and thus I was present when the board (with me abstaining, as was the practice when one's own paper was nominated) narrowly voted against giving the Pulitzer Prize to Salisbury.

"I was terribly upset by this vote, because I was convinced that several of my colleagues made their decision on political rather than journalistic grounds; indeed, they made no bones about it. They supported the war, so they voted against Salisbury." A Change in Focus, This Time to China

After Mr. Salisbury retired from The Times in 1973, he achieved the remarkable feat of writing more than a dozen books while in his late 60's, 70's and 80's.

He was admired for acquiring extensive expertise about China relatively late in his career, after making a name for himself as an expert on the Soviet Union, and also for his tireless and repeatedly successful efforts to get access to many useful informants in exotic and sometimes unfriendly locales.

His introduction to China came in the mid-1960's. Mr. Daniel, as The Times's managing editor, sent him on a wide-ranging tour of Asia, concentrating on the countries bordering China. Mr. Salisbury reported on his travels in a series of articles that ended in mid-August 1966.

"That trip started to switch his expertise to China," Mr. Daniel recalled yesterday, "although he still maintained contacts in the Soviet Union. He knew hundreds of Chinese and Soviet personalities unknown to most other journalists."

Some other journalists have suggested that Mr. Salisbury would sometimes defer his more critical writing about a given milieu until he had gained access to informers there. But admiring journalists have emphasized that his reporting from some news centers, notably Moscow, was limited by censorship.

For his part, Mr. Daniel said, "Harrison Salisbury, like many other correspondents, used his wiles to get into places and later wrote more critically about them than they expected to be written about, particularly when he was out of those places."

Mr. Salisbury did further eyewitness writing about events in Asia in 1989, when he happened to be in Beijing, making a television documentary, when the Chinese Government cracked down bloodily on dissident students in Tiananmen Square. Much of his reporting was published in the form of a book, "Tiananmen Diary: Thirteen Days in June" (Little, Brown, 1989). From Minnesota To Great Beyond

The contentious tone in some of Mr. Salisbury's writing was not surprising, given his Minnesota roots and his admiration for what he once called "the Minnesota spirit, skeptical, contrarian, often out of step, hostile to the Bigs."

Harrison Evans Salisbury was born Nov. 14, 1908, in Minneapolis, the son of Percy Pritchard Salisbury and Georgiana Evans Salisbury, and attended schools there. After doing some reporting for The Minneapolis Journal in 1928 and 1929, he earned a B.A. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1930.

He went to work for the United Press in that year in St. Paul, becoming a much-traveled correspondent based successively in Chicago, Washington and New York before assignments in London in 1943 and Moscow in 1944. The wire-service life with its speed, mobility and hustle shaped his reporting career. He was foreign editor of the agency from 1944 to 1948.

Mr. Salisbury's two decades with the United Press -- now called United Press International -- were hectic. Those years, 1930 to 1948, found him, as Mr. Talese wrote, "moving from St. Paul to Chicago, from Washington to New York to London to Cairo to Moscow, a hundred cities in between, moving so quickly to the clamor of new disasters and datelines and deadlines that his own life sometimes ceased to exist. There simply was no time to think about anything but the news, to get it and write it and write it fast."

He also held editor's posts at the United Press, and as an editor he acquired a reputation for pushing his correspondents hard. The habit stayed with him in his time as national editor of The Times, the author David Halberstam, who worked for him as a correspondent, recalled yesterday.

"He always pushed you," Mr. Halberstam said. "You were expected to come back with the story. You were expected to get it, somehow."

Mr. Salisbury also had great strength of will. In his early years in journalism, like not a few others of his profession, he was a heavy drinker and smoker, but he gave up drinking for good while still at the United Press, associates recalled yesterday, and later gave up smoking. Flurry of Books And Awards, Too <HE

Of his books, at least 10 dealt with the Soviet Union; among them were "Moscow Journal," "Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions 1905-1917" and "Russia in Revolution 1900-1930." About a half dozen others concerned China, like "China: 100 Years of Revolution," "The Long March: The Untold Story" and "The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng."

He also wrote a novel, "The Northern Palmyra Affair" and books on other parts of the world, like "Travels Around America" and "The Many Americas Shall Be One."

He won several other awards for his reporting. He was president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1975 and 1976 and of the Authors League from 1980 to 1985.

His 1933 marriage to Mary Jane Hollis ended in divorce in 1950. He married Charlotte Young Rand in 1964.

Charlotte Salisbury traveled with her husband on almost all of his trips in his last three decades. She also wrote books -- seven of them, all diaries -- about their journeys, beginning with "Asian Diary" (1967) and continuing through "Long March Diary" (1986).

On their trips, she recalled yesterday, "I just took notes all day the way Harrison did, and we had a good time."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Salisbury is survived by a sister, Janet Salisbury, of Minneapolis; two sons, Michael of Chicago and Stefan of Philadelphia, who writes about the arts for the Philadelphia Inquirer; three stepdaughters, Charlotte Parkinson of Manhattan; Ellen Rand of Brooklyn and Rosina Rand Rossire of Salisbury, Conn.; a stepson, Curtis Rand, also of Salisbury; and 13 grandchildren.

A version of this obituary; biography appears in print on July 7, 1993, on Page D00019 of the National edition with the headline: Harrison E. Salisbury, 84, Author and Reporter, Dies. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe